HOME
*





Bao'an Dialect
The Weitou dialect (; Jyutping: Waitau Waa) is a dialect of Yue Chinese. It forms part of the Guan–Bao (莞寶片; , Dongguan– Bao'an) branch of Yuehai. It is spoken by older generations in Luohu and Futian districts in Shenzhen, and by those in the New Territories, Hong Kong. The Weitou dialect can be heard in Hong Kong TV dramas and movies, and is usually used to depict characters who come from walled villages. For example, in the 1992 movie '' Now You See Love, Now You Don't'', the chief character, played by Chow Yun-fat who himself grew up in Lamma Island, consistently speaks the Weitou dialect. In a more general sense, ''Weitouhua'' can refer to any variety of Chinese spoken in the villages of Hong Kong, including Hakka and rural Yue dialects. In contrast, most Hong Kong residents speak standard Cantonese, while most Shenzhen residents speak Mandarin. Phonology Zhang & Zhuang (2003:21-4) records the phonological systems of three varieties of the Weitou diale ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Guangdong
Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) across a total area of about , Guangdong is the most populous province of China and the 15th-largest by area as well as the second-most populous country subdivision in the world (after Uttar Pradesh in India). Its economy is larger than that of any other province in the nation and the fifth largest sub-national economy in the world with a GDP (nominal) of 1.95 trillion USD (12.4 trillion CNY) in 2021. The Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, a Chinese megalopolis, is a core for high technology, manufacturing and foreign trade. Located in this zone are two of the four top Chinese cities and the top two Chinese prefecture-level cities by GDP; Guangzhou, the capital of the province, and Shenzhen, the first special economic zone in the count ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Hong Kong Television Drama
Hong Kong television drama () refers to televised dramatic programming produced mainly by the territory's two free-to-air TV networks of Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) and Asia Television (ATV) until its license expired. Locally produced television dramas have helped contribute to a unique cultural identity among the Hong Kong population and serve as a cultural resource for the Cantonese Chinese speaking community worldwide. History Local broadcast television in Hong Kong was first produced in 1957 with the launch of Rediffusion Television, making it the first territory in Greater China and colony of the British Empire to be served by local TV.Kitley, Philip. 003(2003). Television, Regulation and Civil Society in Asia. Routledge. TVB was later founded in 1967 to become the territory's first free-to-air television network. With a massive influx of refugees from Mainland China coming into a rapidly industrializing Hong Kong during the 1960s and 1970s, the television medium b ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cantonese Language
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group, which has over 80 million native speakers. While the term ''Cantonese'' specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the ''lingua franca'' of the province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guangx ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Tone Name
In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use. *In contemporary standard Chinese (Mandarin), the tones are numbered from 1 to 4. They are descended from but not identical to the historical four tones of Middle Chinese, namely ''level'' (), ''rising'' (), ''departing'' (), and '' entering'' (), each split into ''yin'' () and ''yang'' () registers, and the categories of ''high'' and ''low'' syllables. * Standard Vietnamese has six tones, known as ngang, sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, and nặng tones. * Thai has five phonemic tones: mid, low, falling, high and rising, sometimes referred to in older reference works as rectus, gravis, circumflexus, altus and demissus, respectively.Frankfurter, Oscar. Elements of Siamese grammar with appendices. American Presbyterian mission press, 190(Full text available on Google Books) The table shows an example of both the phoneme, phonemic tones and their phonetic realization, in the IPA. See also *Tone ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Entering Tone
A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a syllable that ends in a stop consonant or a glottal stop. Separating the checked tone allows ''-p'', ''-t'', and ''-k'' to be treated as allophones of ''-m'', ''-n'', and ''-ng'', respectively, since they are in complementary distribution. Stops appear only in the checked tone, and nasals appear only in the other tones. Because of the origin of tone in Chinese, the number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables. In Chinese phonetics, they have traditionally been counted separately. For instance, in Cantonese, there are six tones in syllables that do not end in stops but only three in syllables that do so. That is why although Cantonese has only six tones, in the sense of six contrasting variatio ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Tone Contour
A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America. Contours When the pitch descends, the contour is called a ''falling tone;'' when it ascends, a ''rising tone;'' when it descends and then returns, a ''dipping'' or ''falling-rising tone;'' and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a ''peaking'' or ''rising-falling tone.'' A tone in a contour-tone language which remains at approximately an even pitch is called a ''level tone.'' Tones which are too short to exhibit much of a contour, typically because of a final plosive consonant, may be called '' checked, abrupt, clipped,'' or ''stopped tones.'' It has been theorized that the relative timing of a contour tone is not distinctive. That is, in some accents or ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form.International Phonetic Association (IPA), ''Handbook''. The IPA is used by lexicography, lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguistics, linguists, speech–language pathology, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of wiktionary:lexical, lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in oral language: phone (phonetics), phones, phonemes, Intonation (linguistics), intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech—such as tooth wiktionary:gnash, gnashing, lisping, and sounds made wi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

San Tin
San Tin () is a loosely defined area in Yuen Long District in New Territories, Hong Kong that is part of the San Tin constituency. Unlike Hong Kong's highly urbanised areas, San Tin is sparsely populated due to its marshlands. San Tin is located near Lok Ma Chau. The San Tin Public Transport Interchange services the Lok Ma Chau Control Point–Huanggang Port border crossing, the only 24 hour border crossing between Hong Kong and mainland China. History Early history and etymology The area was largely settled and inhabited by a clan with surname Man (). The clan claims descent from Man Sai-go, who settled near San Tin in the 14th century. For nearly six centuries, the Man clan survived by growing a specialized crop of red rice on brackish-water paddies along the Sham Chun River. The development of the marshy lands into brackish paddies is reflected by the name San Tin which means "new fields". In the 1860s, the Tai Fu Tai Mansion, considered to be an outstanding example of a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Hakka Chinese
Hakka (, , ) forms a language group of varieties of Chinese, spoken natively by the Hakka people throughout Southern China and Taiwan and throughout the diaspora areas of East Asia, Southeast Asia and in overseas Chinese communities around the world. Due to its primary usage in scattered isolated regions where communication is limited to the local area, Hakka has developed numerous Variety (linguistics), varieties or dialects, spoken in different provinces, such as Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Fujian, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangxi and Guizhou, as well as in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Hakka is not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible with Yue Chinese, Yue, Wu Chinese, Wu, Southern Min, Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin or other branches of Chinese, and itself contains a few mutually unintelligible varieties. It is most closely related to Gan Chinese, Gan and is sometimes classified as a variety of Gan, with a few northern Hakka varieties even being partiall ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Varieties Of Chinese
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese. Chinese varieties differ most in their phonology, and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax. Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones, with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi, with the most complex patterns in the coastal ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Lamma Island
Lamma Island, also known as Y Island or Pok Liu Chau or simply Pok Liu, is the third largest island in Hong Kong. Administratively, it is part of the Islands District. Name Lamma Island was named Lamma only because of a chart reading error by Alexander Dalrymple in the 1760s. He had acquired a Portuguese chart to the entrances to the Pearl River and, close to the west of the island, the Portuguese owner had written "Lama". Dalrymple misinterpreted that as the name of the island. However, it was a Portuguese notation as to the holding (consistency of the seabed from the point of view of anchoring there), which was (and is) mud – in Portuguese "lama". In all the early charts the name was spelled with only one "m". So the island acquired a British name by error and one that subsequently was sinicised by its name being rendered phonetically in characters ("Lam a" can mean "south fork" in Cantonese), with the original muddle being all but forgotten. At some point, things became fu ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Chow Yun-fat
Chow Yun-fat (born 18 May 1955), previously known as Donald Chow, is a Hong Kong actor. He is perhaps best known for his collaborations with filmmaker John Woo in the five Hong Kong action heroic bloodshed films: ''A Better Tomorrow'', ''A Better Tomorrow II'', '' The Killer'', '' Once a Thief'' and '' Hard Boiled'', and in the West for his roles as Li Mu-bai in ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' and Sao Feng in '' Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End''. He mainly plays in drama films and has won three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor and two Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor in Taiwan. Chow started his career in movies in 1976 with Goldig Films. Early life and education Chow was born in Lamma Island, Hong Kong, to Chow Yung-wan (), who worked on a Shell Oil Company tanker, and Chan Lai-fong (), who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer. Chow grew up in a farming community on Lamma Island, in a house with no electricity. He woke up at dawn each morning to help hi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]